Daisuke Takahashi

Solo Exhibition

Open Map

2025.4.26 (Sat.) - 5.17 (Sat.)

Opening hours：12:00 – 18:00
Closed on Sundays, Mondays
*We will also be open on 4.29 (Tue.) and 5.3 – 6 (Sat, Sun, Mon, Tue.).
*In conjunction with Daichiro Shinjo Solo Exhibition “Aka“
Opening reception: 4.26 (Sat.) 17:00 – 19:00
*The artist will be present at the reception.
Talk event: 5.10 (Sat.) 18:00 – 19:30 Speakers：Daisuke Takahashi, Itaru Oura(Curator, The Museum of Modern Art, Saitama)

We at ANOMALY are pleased to announce Return, the upcoming solo exhibition of works by Daisuke Takahashi. The exhibition will run from April 26 (Sat.) to May 17 (Sat.), 2025.
Born in 1980, Daisuke Takahashi produced numerous abstract paintings with many thick layers of brilliant pigment beginning with his debut, but changes appeared in his style starting around 2016. At a solo exhibition held in ANOMALY in 2022, he showed a novel series of paintings made by squeezing pigment directly out of the tube onto the canvas, under the influence of his children’s paintings and automatism. These works were completed all at once, and looked like that had been without lifting the brush from the canvas. Thereafter, he continued to experiment and made challenging attempts that were not bound by his career to that point. Displayed for the first time at this exhibition, Open Map is an important series that constitutes as a sort of milestone reached by Takahashi after traveling down a long path filled with changes.

In producing this series, Takahashi noticed the possibility that coloration could end up lost if chosen intuitively. Emulating the Impressionists, he therefore faced the canvas after establishing a rule of mixing two of the three primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) and using only the first mixed color born of the blend. By so doing, he made the most of the characteristics inherently possessed by each color while minimizing their intervention, and was able to choose colors both scientifically and rationally.
In addition, he sought the rationality of drawing arrow-straight lines swiftly through extensive use of masking tape in the painting process. At the same time, he maintained a certain distance from a proactive attitude. For example, once drawn, he actively utilized the lines and left them on the canvas as they were instead of painting over them. He concentrated on the task necessary for not resisting the reality unfolding on the canvas before his eyes, without heading into the images in the artist’s mind.

Furthermore, he made an original interpretation of Cézanne’s famous admonition to treat nature “by means of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone” as a rational means of painting composition, and put it into practice in his art. As with his selection of colors, he curtailed the acts of intuitively producing forms and seeing things mainly with his own eyes, and managed to put the right distance between the artist and the painting.
Born of this process, Takahashi says that the Open Map series is like works with thickly applied paint that forms a structure with a vertical axis which physically comes at the viewer from the supporting medium, painted in a nearly intuitive way on the horizontal axis. The series differs from his impasto works of the past, and Takahashi feels confident that the component works are extremely breezy.
Perhaps the biggest feature of this series is that the works are “opened” and go beyond (= are opened) Takahashi as the artist, as a result of his emphasis on how to go about painting and his pursuit of rationalization.

This raises the question of the identity of the map that was opened. Regarding the maps, Takahashi defines them as the bird’s-eye perspective that can be obtained through this method of production that lets go of the ego.
A bird’s-eye view could also be termed a very Japanese-style conception. For example, painting with the one-point perspective that long dominated Western painting requires a vanishing point, i.e., an absolute viewpoint toward the canvas. Japanese-style painting, on the other hand, has long contained works characterized by multiple perspectives and a slack, loose look. This is best exemplified by a spatial composition like that on the Rakuchu Rakugai paintings, which have a bird’s-eye view and multiple perspectives. Takahashi also took note of the works of Tawaraya Sotatsu and Urakami Gyokudo, and referenced their bold compositions and attitude of leaving expression to the power of the materials. While learning from the works of these predecessors and making his own interpretations of them, it occurred to him that his works would, on the contrary, have a greater vibrancy and appear as free and open maps if he painted them more systematically and less freely, and let go of his ego. In fact, this Open Map series is full of a pleasant, liberating feeling, as if viewers can hear the strains of music from the paintings.

Meanwhile, the works with thickly applied pigment are also one of Takahashi’s major series and continue to evolve today. They make one think that the artist is folding up the maps that he unfolded and spread out in the Open Map series and putting them inside himself again. By also displaying these impasto paintings, we hope this exhibition will help viewers feel the mutual influence between the two series.
Quoting Henri Bergson, Takahashi offered the following comments.

“When I open and close my eyes in rapid succession, I experience a succession of visual sensations each of which is the condensation of an extraordinarily long history unrolled in the external world.
“There are then, succeeding one another, billions of vibrations, that is a series of events which, even with the greatest possible economy of time, would take me thousands of years to count.”
– Henri Bergson, Mind-Energy, translated by H. Wildon Carr

I love these words of Bergson, and wholeheartedly sympathize with them. I am beginning to think that what I have accomplished in my painting and done in my life so far is being continuously recorded as single tableaux while being tossed about within the “billions of vibrations,” i.e., the energy mentioned by Bergson. To put it another way, instead of painting with a one-point perspective and taking a self-centered view of the world, which has been valued by Western-style painting up until the modern period, I myself shall enter my paintings, as I am.
I have also started to think that, to a greater or lesser degree, this Open Map series is a stage in a progressive approach to Asian landscape painting, the Shangri-la vision, and the structure of medieval icons.

About nine years have passed since Takahashi first began to work out the conception of Open Map. By all means, please do not miss this chance to see the works he produced as the culmination of this journey while exposed to “billions of vibrations.”
On May 10 (Sat.), during the run of this exhibition, we are going to hold a talk event with the participation of Itaru Oura, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, Saitama (MOMAS). Oura curated the NEW VISION SAITAMA 5: The Emerging Body, which was held at MOMAS in 2016 and included works by Takahashi, and has followed the course of his paintings ever since. We hope to see you at this event, too.

[NOTE] *1Automatism: Also termed “automatic writing” and “automatic phenomenon.” In his Manifesto of Surrealism, Andre Breton defined this methodology as a means “to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” (Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen. R. Lane.)

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Daisuke Takahashi
1980 Born in Saitama Prefecture, Japan
2005 Awarded a bachelor’s degree from the Department of Department of Fine Arts, Tokyo Zokei University
Lives and works in Saitama.

A painter. Following his debut, he began painting numerous works with several layers of thickly applied pigment, and became known for making pieces which powerfully show that paintings are materials before they are images. Starting around 2016, we may observe the seminal appearance of works with numbers, letters, and other signs, and a transition to paintings that take everyday objects as their motifs. Since around 2020, he has been experimenting in forms such as his Ashan series, which imagines and depicts a specific person of interest who is not known in any detail. Takahashi’s unflagging spirit of inquiry into painting is filled with anticipations of encountering an as yet unseen type of work.

His main exhibitions in recent years were ASHAN (2023, CADAN YURAKUCHO, Tokyo), Doing Painting – A Bright Turnabout (2022, ANOMALY, Tokyo), Group Show of Contemporary Artists 2022 Energy Overflowing from the Gaze (2022, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum), Halfway Happy Vol. 5, Daisuke Takahashi – RELAXIN’ (2021, gallery αM), Sazaedo 2020 – Modern Spiral and a Hundred Paintings (2020, Art Museum & Library, Ota), NEW VISION SAITAMA 5 – The Emerging Body (2016, Museum of Modern Art, Saitama), Present-Day Paintings – Two-Dimensional Works of Four Artists (2015, Kawagoe City Art Museum), and The Way of Painting (2014, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery).